Andy Murray, Mardy Fish earn wins at BNP Paribas

Andy Murray, of Great Britain, returns a shot to Evgeny Donskoy, of Russia, during their match at the BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament on Sunday, March 10, 2013, in Indian Wells, Calif. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

AP

Associated Press

Published: Sunday, March 10, 2013 at 10:49 p.m.

Last Modified: Sunday, March 10, 2013 at 10:49 p.m.

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. (AP) — Andy Murray earned a 5-7, 6-2, 6-2 win over Evgeny Donskoy in a second-round match at the BNP Paribas Open on Sunday.

Murray, the No. 3 seed at the $10 million event, had lost his opening match at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden in each of the past two years.

He said he had no explanation for those results, but that he hadn’t felt any different Sunday than he had a year ago, with one exception.

“I have not played a match for five weeks (since losing the Australian Open final to Novak Djokovic on Jan. 27) so you can’t expect to play your best tennis straightaway,” Murray said.

“He started off well and I started off slowly. Even once I got back into the match at 5-all (after being down 5-1 in the first set) he played some good stuff. Once I got into a rhythm, I was able to dictate more of the points.”

Also, Mardy Fish of the United States earned a 6-3, 3-6, 6-4 win over Bobby Reynolds.

Fish played his first competitive match of the year after not playing since last September because of a heart condition.

“It’s been a tough few months, for sure. You sort of feel like it was a win just to go back out there,” Fish said.

“There’s a lot of people that have sort of dealt with what I’ve dealt with and not come back. It’s nice to just play, first and foremost, and then you get out there and you want to win.

“You want to stay within yourself a little bit and not get too fired up or too low or too high or anything like that. Then all of a sudden you find yourself in the third set, you know, deep in the third set losing (4-2), and some of that sort of fight starts kicking in and you want to win.

“I certainly didn’t expect to win so soon. The tennis side of it hasn’t been an issue. I have been playing for quite a while now, as far as months are concerned, but just competitive matches, you can’t duplicate those.”

Fish lost only three points in winning the final four games.

He hasn’t disclosed the precise nature of his problem because “it’s not something that’s very easy to talk about.”

“I’m going to play Miami (next week),” he said, “and then I’m going to assess it after that, Maybe step back and see how I feel, where I am personally, see after these two weeks if it’s something I can still do at a high level. That will certainly be a question I’ll ask. Hopefully I’ll resume sort of a normal schedule, but we’ll see.”